TekkieValley

Project Summary
During the summer of 2010, I had some extra time of my hands, and wanted to create a proof of concept. I had all sorts of ideas, but I wanted to see what I could create in two months (June and July) in terms of fleshing out one of my ideas. The result was TekkieValley. The name is a portmanteau of Techie (Tekkie) + Silicon Valley. I succeeded in creating a somewhat niche video site, but in the end abandoned it because of the work in maintaining the SMARTY-PHP template which makes it difficult to customize, as well as the integration of various APIs. It had potential though, if I had more time before school I would’ve fleshed it out a bit more.

Technologies used:
The site was designed primarily using HTML/CSS, JavaScript/AJAX and PHP. It was built on the video site package Clipshare. Clipshare came with a proprietary PHP framework called Smarty-PHP. While Smarty PHP made it easier to edit individual elements of the site, it made it more difficult to customize and add new sections to each site. I was considering switching the framework to an MVC one such as CodeIgnitor or Symphony but decided it was too much work and just left it as is. This made it considerably difficult to integrate it with other APIs.

Responsibilities/Roles
I functioned as the webmaster, programmer and graphics artist for this website, as it was entirely done in my spare time. All the extra functionality that ClipShare’s base didn’t have I added onto it, using various APIs from Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow, MediaWiki, etc. Additional JS functionality was taken from Dynamic Drive.

Project details
TekkieValley was a site meant to facilitate the access of tech related information to everyone. Its main purpose was to like to provide a Silicon Valley-like hub on the internet where Techies can gain knowledge and share ideas with each other through the growing power of video.
To that end, users had the option to upload all varieties of tech oriented videos, walkthroughs, tutorials, webinars and anything else related to the evolving world of technology. I wanted to create a video site that aggregated related content as the user was watching the video. The user would watch the video and from the side, keywords that the video was tagged with was used to generate related content from widgets that held Twitter feeds, blog posts, Youtube, Wiki articles, etc. This made it easier for the user to find what they were looking for instead of having to manually Google everything all the time.